


Pull

by Claus_Lucas



Category: Mother 3
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Gore, Mechanical horror, Nightmares, Psychological Horror, Trauma, Uncanny Valley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 13:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7978501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claus_Lucas/pseuds/Claus_Lucas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucas has a dream where all his bones are replaced by Claus's and they're haunted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pull

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this for [ness](http://pazbot.tumblr.com/). based on a dream and a friend's blabbering while high on anesthetic.
> 
> [mouth connects to the teeth and teeth to the loves and curses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9prpAv6kvo)

Lucas has a dream where he is in a terrible accident and all of his bones are broken beyond repair. At the hospital, the new one that the army built, the doctor says, "How fortunate, miraculous even, that we could find a perfect donor, a perfect fit." Lucas looks at the walls, the coats, the bandages, all white, white like the inside of eyes, like unblemished skies, like the surface of teeth. On the last day, Lucas's dad squeezes his hand and says, "You're going home; I finally, finally found you."

Lucas knows that replacing all his bones must've taken a full skeleton, a dead skeleton, or at least he assumes they used a dead person's skeleton. They wouldn't have used someone living, killed them just to take their skeleton, or, maybe, someone gave their skeleton to him, someone gave their life? But Lucas has no family besides his father (who is alive) and no friends besides Fuel, Angie, Nichol, and Richie (who are also alive). Another villager? No, Lucas finds that unlikely. Lucas finds the entire experience unlikely, though. Unlikely means for an unlikely result.

Why did his bones break beyond repair and how did they replace them with perfectly new ones, perfectly fitting ones?

Why does his father treat him like a different, better person? (Is it because he almost lost his son and now expresses his relief through attention and approval?)

Then, he hears a rustle. He hears a creaking. He hears the bones connected at his elbow grind against each other and the grinding mutates into words, and he understands them all, clearly. "I can't rest." His femur starts to wriggle, calcium slapping flesh. "This is no bed, no grave." His collar bone just straight-out moans -"They dug me out, Lucas, put me back." It's Claus. His twin. A perfect donor, a perfect fit -a ghost in his bones, haunting them like it's the house where he died.

So he does. Lucas goes, in the middle of the night, to the gravestone on the hill, to find the earth there is still wet, recently uprooted, recently ransacked. He pushes his hands into the ground and digs, with his mother as his witness, until he sees the sleek black wood, but he doesn't stop for long, he continues to plow, finally lifting the casket from its hole with strength that is not his own. All throughout, the bones in his body are urging, they're begging, demanding. His teeth especially, like excited and apprehensive children, shriek their pleas: "We can't see here," "We don't belong," "If the last person mourning us in the room would just leave."

Lucas remembers when Claus said that people can't really die until those that love them have accepted it. "So," he said, "if we keep thinking that mom is alive, she can't, really, die." Of course that's a lie. That's fake. People die and stay dead regardless of what you do. Usually.

His gums are searing by the time he undoes the lock and pries open the lid. Lucas peers inside. There is nothing but twin, slender trails of mud ending in the imprint of a foot and a sock, respectively. Lucas did not stop to consider what they had done to the rest of Claus. After taking his bones, putting them in Lucas, what became of the skin, the muscle, the eyes, the organs?

"I'm scared," murmurs the bone at the tip of his left index finger. And Lucas, too, is unbearably scared. A terror so vivid and wretched he is willing to commit any act that'll, with certainly, eradicate the feeling permanently.

He stands, but his knees shout, "Put me back!" and they buckle, he stumbles, fall right into the casket, which then promptly slams shut. Darkness. He nudges the lid and it doesn't budge. He could press harder, but he feels weak, feels like there's no point, he won't win, even if he manages to free himself, that's not what's really needed here. His baby milk teeth, the ones Claus never shed, the ones that are the most fragile, they huddle together, clicking, clanking, their own form of weeping. "Put us back together, where we belong." Lucas reaches into his mouth, takes a hold of one of his wisdom teeth, and pulls. He pulls, pulls, pulls. The teeth is released with a gush of blood, coats it whole, and the abode it has abandoned scorches with pain, but he pays it no mind, feels no regret, guilt. He drops the tooth on the floor of the casket and notices, with surprising relief, that it has ceased to cry. But the rest of his skeleton continues to crack and growl and pop. He has to put everything to peace. He digs his hand under his collarbone, and pulls.

He pulls.

* * *

 

Pearl light captures the angles of geometrical figures undulating like waves; stars spangled across a black sea. The creases in the leather rise and descend, drawing from the movements in his upper muscles for inspiration, a shadow only a second behind its target. Nobody can tell if he's breathing beneath that jacket, ebony mountain range with a single silver river. And nobody can tell if he speaks, his face half concealed by a metal mask, half restrained by a bandanna. Beneath his lips seem to move but there are no words that could claim membership to the muffled snarl that spawns from them. Paint-sprayed silicon mashes into the earth that's still wet and slippery from past rainfall and his left fingers curl into a fist. There isn't a cloud in the night sky as far as Lucas can see and so it comes as a great surprise when thunder shatters in his eardrums. His dodging is instinctive.

The Commander's mechanical eye trails Lucas like a searchlight. A red haze envelops him when he finds himself staring directly into it and he wonders briefly if the Commander sees the world split between shades of gray and shades of red. His hand is opening and an electrified contraption is sliding against his palm. Without an apparent source, there is the reek of smoke.

The significance of time dissolves. Lucas raises his arms, unprepared. Triangles of denim light surround most of his body, but there's still the tip of the sword that manages to burst through his shield. It moves so fast that it slices through his wrist and elbow.

Lucas drops to his knees, holding the injured arm with his other hand. He breathes in audible heaves. His physiology has transitioned too quickly and abruptly from a state of repose to one of self-defense. He tries not to wince when he lifts his arms again. Hexagons of cyan and seashell pink implode from his fingertips. He screams, not because he's angry or afraid, but because of the energy he has to muster.

The Commander is unperturbed. He receives a pure dose of Lucas's power and it knocks him backwards, but he's standing when his boots hit the ground. Several of the circuits closest to his skin snap and electricity charges his limbs. A gear in his jaw falls out of its belt and he slaps it back into place, oil dribbling from his covered mouth. Now the scent that surrounds them is of burning plastic. The Commander understands the nature of Lucas's abilities and judges accordingly.

The tapestry of psychic fireworks hit Lucas like bullets, similar to his technique but beyond any level he's mastered. This time the triangles to counter it are purple but once more insufficient. Several parts of his body ache like they've been set ablaze. Only a streak beneath his chin is actually disfigured and painted a visceral red. The charred flesh adds a layer of difficulty to breathing.

Lightning grazes his right leg and he rolls out of the glare of the headlights. One of the Commander's sleeves is scorched, and beneath the skin has also peeled away, exposing a metal amalgamate of cogs and tubes. Green liquid courses through transparent vials. Grease coats his synthetic muscles, which are entirely white.

This is a dream Lucas has had before.

The Commander corners him and he hasn't the strength to fend him off. He can't escape. It's dark, like nighttime, and the Commander emerges without warning, without reason. He is, in a way, the entire scenery -Lucas can never wrap his vision around anything else.

Sometimes the Commander kills Lucas with PK Love. Sometimes he strikes with lightning until Lucas consciousness goes unhinged. Sometimes the Commander crushes Lucas's face with his boot, takes a hold of his bleeding arm, and pulls.

But Lucas doesn't know he's dreaming. This dream can go anywhere.

The Commander lowers himself to Lucas's level and pulls the bandanna off of his mouth. Then he starts talking.

Liquid the color of rust is stuck between his teeth and gums. His denture, especially the canines, are unnatural, polished towards superiors sharpness, like a well-crafted statue. The gentle clicking of gears emanates from his throat, present in each sentence -the emptiness between each letter on a piece of paper.

"I can feel the memory of my bones," the Commander says, "inherited from their previous host. Their habits, their reflexes, their instincts. Like memory foam, incapable of assuming another form after the initial imprint."

Lucas offers no response. There is no space to accommodate it. This is a long and complicated monologue squeezed into the tiny bit that they get to share. Dreams are so brief.

"I can teach them to do new things, but they will always remember what came first. When I lay down, my neck bends itself so my chin touches my chest and my arms are around my stomach. My ribcage aches if I try to fall asleep facing up: it forces me to lay sideways, knees touching my waist."

In that hunched position, the waves in his clothes are even thicker. But he isn't moving, and they're still stirring, a slight, subtle, and almost choreographed twitch. Like he might be breathing. Lucas observes.

"And it's not just my bones," the Commander says, "Everything underneath my skin that isn't mechanical has its own history.

"I prepare to speak and words that I wasn't aware of crawl out of my throat like claws scaling a cliffside, desperate and vicious in their grip. It seems that my larynx has catchphrases it associates with certain situations. I do not understand them and yet to deny them means chewing blood out of my tongue.

"Scents I haven't inhaled are soaked into my lungs and they rise periodically into my nostrils: sand in a seashell, freshly baked nut bread, drying laundry, sheep's wool. I recognize them later. First they taunt me with their uncertain source and uncertain identity.

"I'm allergic to most species of flowers native to the Islands. When I see fire, without fail, I hear an immense stone bell being struck, over and over again until the fire has disappeared.

"I have phantom pains for phantom limbs, and I watch my prosthetic arm scatter its components so that only a slab of mutilated muscle and broken bone remains."

The Commander removes his helmet. Lucas doesn't know what he sees. It's the Commander's face, but his brain can't invent a face he hasn't seen. There are details in extraordinary lucidity -like the gray lines running from his eyes to his chin, fenced by the tiny heads of nails; like his right eyelid drooping lower than the left one- but nothing to define him for sure. The bigger picture is shrouded and he will not remember it when he wakes up.

Lucas is once more aware of the red beacon cast upon him. It disappears for an instant when he blinks and Lucas experiences a brief terror -the idea of being shut out of that moment forever.

But the Commander has more to say.

"The incident that tore out my eye left a scar to testify;" -he means the swelled strip of purple, almost black skin that crosses it horizontally-, "sometimes I feel her talon bury into my face and raze through my eye, again, like it's an event without a conclusion."

Lucas wonders who she is but not for very long. The rest of what the Commander says is too intriguing.

"She did me a favor, though. To remove my entire facial skin will take a while. It's the other eye that really bothers me. It has impressions."

The Commander's real eye is brown.

"It's only half of my worldview, so I can usually ignore it, but if I close my artificial eye, if I can only look through the other one, it's there: a house made of wood, the left side of a bed, a splash of water and then the belly of a river. A gravestone adorned with wrapped flowers.

"Hallucinations, obviously," he adds, like an afterthought, something he hadn't deemed necessary until he sees the flicker of panic in Lucas's retinas.

"Normally there is no way any of these would interfere with my duties. But there was one time. I lost complete control. It was when they took me to their new lab. There was a room filled with frozen specimens. The largest was a bipedal reptile, quite young, I was told, but still-"

Lucas takes a deep breath. The Commander stops speaking. There's a pause, then he starts again as if he hadn't.

"I'm used to being modified. I lose parts all the times, occasionally because I break them myself. Each time they open me up, I ask them to take something away. To replace it. They've taken my spleen, my right ear, my frontal lobe. And my body quiets down a little bit after. There is a decline in restlessness, discomfort, confusion."

Here Lucas witnesses the Commander's first ever facial expression: a grimace.

"I've been told I can survive. I can live without these fossils. But the process is slow and tedious. They can only do so much while my body continues to reject its original components," the Commander says, pulling down the zipper of his jacket and reaching his hand inside it. "So, sometimes, I just throw bits up, like a bad meal."

The Commander's fingers are digging into his chest, the skin there ripping like polyester, a substance that is as thick and dark as tar streaming from the holes. Half of his hand disappears into the mesh of melting, pulsating flesh. The Commander is looking directly at Lucas and Lucas feels, not like he's expected to do something, but more like he's being given permission to.

Lucas touches the Commander's hand, tentatively, hesitantly at first, and then his fingers go around the Commander's palm and he starts to pull. He realized that the Commander is pulling, too.

He needs help pulling it out.

It isn't mechanical. It's made of muscle and blood, and comes attached to a network of veins. The Commander pierces them with his nails and they snap off, spraying blood and lying limp against his stomach. The heart immediately stops beating, but it doesn't seem to affect him. His grimace has disintegrated and he is once more vacant. Apathy feels like an attack on Lucas's shaking, sweating composure and he turns away, turns down, just in time to see the heart dropped in front of him.

Blood touches his knees and he feels like pulling away. Away from this scene. Away from this person. Away from what he's done.

But there can be no more pulling.

"Take this one," the Commander says, "it's been bothering me for the longest time."


End file.
